TFA doesn't mention the size of their monitor, or the ratio of it, or the distance they typically sit from their monitor, or the horizontal placement (relative to their eyeballs), or the type of work they're doing.
I'd also expect a mention of the amount of curve they are upset about.
There's a few varieties, the 1500R and the 1800R were the most common two when I was shopping last year, in the AU domestic market. Those numbers refer to how the monitor might fit on an imagined circle's radius (measured in millimetres, naturally). So an 1800R is a gentler curve than a 1500R.
I find UW's beyond about 34" are mostly more comfortable in an 1800R for 'office work' activities (not including CAD, photo / image manipulation, etc) and gaming.
(I actually have a 43" flat, in 16:9, it sits about a metre from my eyeballs, and I usually aim for my eyes to be about 1/3 the way from the top of the screen. After several months with this, I now feel a gentle curve on this would be a bit more ergonomic.)
I like my curved ultra-wide. I didn't at first, but my brain has very noticeably adapted to where curved things on it appear straight just fine. I noticed this when I went back to the office after a few weeks absence, where I have a regular flat pancake screen in 16:9, and straight text looked CURVED in the opposite direction!
Brains are weird.
I got a curved 5k2k lg display for games, and every time I switch to work monitor (5k regular flat lg), it feels like I'm looking at an old CRT that's bulging out at me. Such a strange sensation. I do like the curved display a lot however.
Wow, that's a great insight and honestly a great point for not having one. At least till they get more popular.
As someone who wears corrective lenses for astigmatism, I can guarantee that what you perceive as a straight line, assuming you are human, is not, until your brain corrects it and signals 'straight line' to you.
It takes a day or so for your brain to get used to any consistent distortion and totally disregard it.
This is just pointless complaining... A bigger complaint with curved screens is: crazy reflections.
I had this experience back when the glass on CRTs was curved and monitors started shipping with knobs to adjust the curvature of the image. I had used a curved-glass CRT (curved the opposite way of today's curved monitors) for so long that nothing looked quite right after that until LCDs came into the picture (pun intended).
Did it ever happen to you, that you are not dealing with humans and therefore you noted this assumption?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
Though I suspect their visual system works the same way.
As someone who wears corrective lenses for astigmatism, I can guarantee that what you perceive as a straight line, assuming you are human, is not, until your brain corrects it and signals 'straight line' to you.
That is unrelated to astigmatism. In Art 101 class in college we explored this phenomenon. It's caused by the spherical nature of the human eyeball.
The exercise was to sit on the floor in the corner of a particular campus building that had a lot of long architectural lines and draw what you see without looking at the paper. If you drew straight lines, the prof knew you were thinking about drawing, and not just drawing what you saw.
Was there actually more to this posting and it got cut off? I'm not seeing why this is a practical issue. I'm partial to large displays with a more traditional aspect ratio, but using ultrawides, including curved ones occasionally isn't annoying to me. What really grinds my gears is that one coworker who doggedly insists on sharing his full desktop every single damned time which makes text nearly unreadable on anything other than another ultrawide.
Different people have different preferences.
I suspect a bunch of smaller manufacturers would have more success with their products if there was an easy way to try them out for a week or two. Buying hardware sight-unseen incurs a heavy risk penalty. Buying it after seeing it in a store for ten minutes is some reduction, but not a lot.
How many people would spend $250 on a split ergo ortho keyboard having never touched anything other than a laptop or maybe a mushy $12 pack-in included with their Dell at work?
What's the appropriate solution other than inflating the price even more to cover a generous return policy?
I might buy a Keyboard.io or a Moonlander... but there's a pretty high risk I won't love it. These things can be subtle: I quite like the X-Bows Knight I'm typing on now, and can't stand the Keychron Q10 which, by all rights, I ought to find about as comfortable.
Once upon a time there were these places called “retail stores” where you could go look at actual products and even try them out before buying them.
Alas.
That works for a conventional mouse: you've used one before. This one is a little different shape, a little bigger, ooh, no wires. That's fine: in five minutes you know whether it's OK.
How long does it take to decide whether you love or hate a thumb-ball? A big ball? A SpaceMouse? Has anyone who didn't use a ThinkPad decide to buy a keyboard with an integrated nubbin?
Sure, I can buy twenty devices for $200 each and return 19 of them. That puts 19 items into "open box" status, causes me to re-pack and re-ship and track 19 items, and makes 19 vendors vaguely cranky at me.
I get your point. When I had RSI in my right elbow and tried to find a replacement for a traditional mouse there were soooo many attempts. And I had to use them for a while both to see if they helped, but also to see if I managed to use them properly. Like, a mouse where you rolled a ball with your thumb I never got friendly with even after a few weeks.
In the end the problem was actually moving the hand away from the keyboard, so no tilted mouse, thumb mouse or track pad worked. A RollerMouse saved me. I even game with it now, heh.
Just lucky my company paid for all of it (and the ones I didn't use they got back by me distributing to others within the company with issues)
I'm not sure where you're based, but don't you have consumer protections that allow you to return goods you regret buying? I know that even in places with good return regulations, there are exceptions, but where I live, I could buy a monitor from Amazon to try it out, and if I don't like it, just return it within the 30 days and buy another one. I assumed it was like this in most of the western world? Maybe I'm a bit naive.
I know a bunch of people who do this for cloth shopping (which isn't a great idea considering everything else except themselves, obviously), where they don't know exactly what size will fit them, so they buy the same dress in 2-3 sizes, try them out at home then return the ones that didn't fit.
I'm fairly certain such regulations don't exist anywhere. They would be far too easy to exploit, raising the cost of doing business and exposing them to outright fraud. Regulations meant to protect consumers usually protect them from dishonst business practices.
The type of return you're talking about is usually intended to encourage people to make a purchase and to protect the reputation of a business. Yet the moment they detect abuse, abuse being return patterns that are atypical or that will end up costing the business more money in the long run, you can be sure they will stop honouring their return policy.
This is 100% a European law that exists. You are entitled returns within 14 days of purchase for most goods. No reason need be provided.
>I could buy a monitor from Amazon to try it out, and if I don't like it, just return it within the 30 days and buy another one. I assumed it was like this in most of the western world? Maybe I'm a bit naive.
1. While many places have no questions asked return policies, many also have more stringent return conditions, such as not allowing exchange for dissatisfaction. For tech retailers, where the margins are low and the goods value is high, I often find they're worse than with clothes, for instance.
2. I did some cursory searching and it doesn't look like even EU guarantees the right to return for satisfaction reasons. The closest is the 14 day right of withdraw for distance purchases, but that can be waived and doesn't cover in-store purchases.
3. Even when returns are theoretically allowed, there are many ways for retailers to make it a hassle, such as not covering return shipping, which for a monitor could be a sizeable amount of money.
Over the years I've gifted a few nice keyboards to people and their immediate response has often been "why didn't I get a proper mechanical keyboard sooner!"
They had only used cheap plastic or laptop keyboards until then and never saw a keyboard as a tool to invest in for their profession (which often required plenty of typing).
> a mushy $12 pack-in included with their Dell at work
For what they are, the standard Dell keyboards are quite nice.
Pepperidge Farm remembers when Fujitsu computers (those assembled in germany into the 2010s) used to come with rebadged steel-plate Cherry keyboards. Okay, they had mushy browns I think, but still. You go unpack the bundled keyboard and it weighs a kilo. They were still rubberdomes (G83 I think?), just really nice ones.
Would the author of this post have enjoyed or hated seeing a movie in Cinerama? Anyone who has been seated too close to a flat IMAX screen knows that even a flat screen can give a severely distorted viewing experience if you're not in a good viewing position (e.g. if you're seated off-axis and close).
In recent years, curved panels have been a way to compensate for issues created by limited viewing angles offered by LCD screens. If a screen is sufficiently large and the seating position close enough, one could often see a pattern on the screen even when viewing a single solid colour. The choice of screen geometry was a choice between different forms of image distortion. As technology improves and viewing angles become wider and more consistent, we'll probably see curved panels become more niche again.
I don't mind curved screens, but what I do mind is that so many wide / curved screens have such low vertical resolution. 1440px is just so little space.
It's a cost thing, ultrawide has always been expensive relative to how much extra area you get, and pushing the resolution up compounds that. 5120x2160 (extended 4K) panels do exist but they cost a fortune.
But why is it a cost thing? I got a 55 inch 8k tv for less than 1000 usd years ago, including sales tax and overhead from a physical store. It’s the best monitor I’ve used.
Today, many years later, monitors are still way worse and more expensive! Also you can basically not buy the tv’s anymore either.
The panel factories existed, and the panels were cheap, years ago. They’re just not used anymore (or so it seems).
Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved Thunderbolt™ Hub Monitor - U4025QW
Worth every penny.
Yes indeed. Brilliant monitor.
I have one as well. Indeed worth every penny, although to be fair that's quite a lot of pennies.
And not in OLED, only in VA panels, unfortunately.
I can't justify going high end on a monitor without it being OLED.
LG has a 5120x2160 OLED already, but it's 45" so the pixel density isn't great. It's also stupid expensive, about double the cost of a regular 4K OLED for 30% more width. They have 39" and 34" variants on their roadmap though.
True, that is an option I forgot about. I generally don't see it any better than a standard 16:9 OLED given the price and limited (in comparison to 32:9) width though.
> the pixel density isn't great.
I got one of the 49" 32:9 OLED and it has 1140 vertical. I'm making due with it and had to tweak settings like crazy to make it tolerable... I'd love a proper 2160 option for the ratio. I came from a 28" 4K TN panel, so it's been a major change of tradeoffs.
It's hard to justify the higher price on the smaller 45", it makes it a hard sell over a standard 16:9 ratio 4K OLED (although I wonder if that would have been the better choice over what I got).
I found the LG 38GL950G-B to be a good compromise with a resolution of 3840x1600 that I purchased back in 2020.
I just recently picked up a 32 inch curved 1440p screen and it's awful, for that size I should have realized I needed a 4k. Text is horribly pixelated and when looking dead on it feels like the aspect ratio is closer to 4:3 or something. Coming from an ultra wide 1440p I'm really disappointed.
> 1440px is just so little space.
1440px tall on a common 13 tall ultrawide is 107 PPI.
In my mind > 100 PPI is pretty much perfect for most tasks. Or are you talking about physical size?
100ppi is like minimum bar to entry. It’s barely better than 24” 1080p from 20 years ago.
100 ppi is horrible for coding.
For a 34 incher, 1440px is perfect, and so is a 34 incher. A higher resolution renders text too small to read, and a larger monitor has one moving their head around instead of just their eyes.
Of course, they are not ideal for the graphical work that the author implies, but they can't be beat for productivity work imho.
People differ. For me, 4k is perfect for an 31.5 incher I have, and I make fonts as small as possible (6.5px fonts in my editor I use all day right now). I appreciate huge expanses of quite readable (for me) text I get.
> A higher resolution renders text too small to read
Have you missed the last decade of High DPI displays and scaling?
My holy grail of computer monitors is an 8k 55" curved screen. Not a shorty, but a full 55" or 65" 16:9 (or similar) screen with 7680 x 4320 resolution, but curved.
I currently have three 4k 32" screens in portrait arranged in a sort of curved configuration. I love it, except for the bezels. It's something like this: https://i.sstatic.net/YocaE.jpg
I was almost ready to purchase a flat 8k 55" TV for my workstation, but decided to try a flat 4k 55" TV I already had, and the flatness just ruined it for me. I need a slight curve when using such a large surface area only a few feet from my eyes. I guess I'll have to stick with my three 4k monitors for now.
You might like a larger one in landscape in the middle, keeping the two 32" in portrait either side. Angled inwards.
I did not check the physical geometry so the side screens are taller than the center but whatever. 43" flat center, 32" either side. Felt strongly like a mistake when first set up but has grown on me.
Easy solution: Reorient the monitor in portrait mode. /s
I have a view of a brick wall, that has a setback, so the left part of the wall is closer than the part to the right. From a certain distance, the setback has six vertical courses aligning with the mortar and on the closer face of the wall every five courses. I wonder how perceptive our visual areas might be with respect to pixels when I see the shattered shadows of LED panel parking lot lights (32 individual point sources) or the strobe at night of headlights. Still, I would like a curved display. Maybe a Las Vegas Eyeball.
For the investment of one image, maybe a second image might have made your point. I don't like curved displays either, but I observe many widescreen photos offer a distorted view of the scene taken on a large flat monitor, since the lens is a compromise as is printing on flat media, and so the image as presented from a wide-angle is NOT accurate, any more than a curved screen of a 55mm lens would be. The problem here is horses-for-courses: if you have a wide curved screen then you should ask your digital devices to render images as if they are being displayed on a curved surface, not as if they are flat.
Anamorphic lenses should be projected/presented on curved surfaces and packages like Hugin will render images which should look pretty good on a curved surface of a known radius, assembled from sets of non-curved flat images put together in a panorama. Or apps like Bimostitch on android, which looks to use the same algorithms.
I don't like curved screens because I haven't learned to rotate my head the way needed to deal with content on the edge. I like dual monitors in a V more than a single wide-screen because they can be independently desktop-panned, only some widescreens do this (by s/w rendering it as two heads)
For some work (Audacity - audio editing, and related video work) a wide screen is fantastic. Horses for courses.
This got me thinking, are there any games that have a graphics setting for monitor curvature? Because they should, IIRC the standard is rectilinear rendering, where the perspective comes out correct only if the monitor is flat. But if people can get used to glasses that severely distort the image, I guess this isn't a big deal.
Also, my obligatory rant, ultrawide monitors do not exist, only ultrashort, and 16:10 shouldn't have become a "premium/business/designer/prosumer" option, it should just be the standard. Nobody gets a VR headset and crops off the bottom and top thirds of the image and claims it's more immersive that way.
I don't like straight displays, things at the corners are a different size than things in the middle, because they are further from my head. On curved displays, objects on different areas of the screen are the same size as they originally appeared.
> I don't like straight displays, things at the corners are a different size than things in the middle, because they are further from my head.
Are you sitting really close or have a really enormous monitor? Measuring how I'm sitting right now, my nose is exactly 61cm from the center-center of my monitor, and ~72cm between my nose and any of the corners, and it's a 32" monitor.
I'm usually sensitive to things not being 100% straight/level/aligned, and if I create five identically sized windows and put them in the middle and one in each corner, I see no difference between them.
The distortion is mostly a problem with ultrawide monitors, which typically have the pixel density of a regular 16:9 monitor, but with twice as width.
Flat ultrawides are an especially miserable experience, where the sides of the monitor are viewed at a 60 degree angle, a pronounced deviation from the 90 degree angle in the middle.
> On curved displays, objects on different areas of the screen are the same size
This is only true if your eyes are in the focus point (center of the circle) and you never move your head or chair.
That's why you gotta get yourself one of these, obviously: https://www.ergoquest.com/zero-gravity-workstation-0a.html
Yeah, projecting onto a plane instead of a... spherical dome? means that things at the border of your screen are more visible than the things at its middle which definitely not how eyes usually work.
It's especially glaring when the far plane serves as the place where the view-distance limiting fog is rendered: if there is some thing barely visible before you, turn 45% to the side, and you'll see that thing very clearly at the side of your view.
I'd go absolutely apeshit over a 4:3 dome curved screen.
Yep, that's what I noticed when I got a 34" ultrawide. After swapping for a 38" curved screen, the experience is better.
I use a nice 32" 4k IPS panel for work and it's borderline OK in the corners. However I got a really wide curved screen for a second computer and in that case I really appreciate the shape just because it mitigates the distortion somewhat.
The eye adjusts to it. Since getting used to a curved monitor, flat monitors now look convex-curved like an old CRT to me when sitting in front of them.
Yes! The edges of my large, flat monitor feel like they are curved outwards. It's certainly not a huge deal, but next time I get a monitor this large I'll be going with curved to counteract that effect.
i never thought i'd like a curved display until i got one..now i want to move all my monitors to curved...i guess to each their own!
I had no opinion until I was assigned one at work. My opinion is the opposite of yours. I find it very annoying (for reasons entirely unrelated to what the article is talking about), and wish that I could swap it out. I may smuggle my own monitor in to do that.
Different strokes for different folks!
I think LCDs have been around long enough that we no longer notice all the problems with them. If you have a large monitor on your desk, chances are very good that there is nowhere you can place your head where some part of the display doesn't look noticeably darker than another part. You can TRY to compensate for that by cranking the brightness up, but then you set yourself up for eye strain.
I'm lead to believe that OLED displays don't have these issues (and have much better color fidelity as well) but they have a limited lifespan.
For me, I've found that some curved displays are better than others. My home monitor is curved, on a seemingly very large radius, and I love it!
However some that I've used that are more curved make everything look distorted.
I've been thinking of getting one. What is your use-case and why do you like it? Mine would be mostly work, but at least some gaming each week.
My regret is I didn't buy a 4K one at 32" but it's still good
Some of my buddies have that 8K Samsung one, that one is nuts to see in person
Little curve good, big curve bad. Imagine its 20 years ago before these monitors were made and you had multiple monitors.
Ever see a dashboard chihuahua? (Or on the rear deck of a car). Thats you if you use a multimonitor setup. Do that for even 10 years, your neck hurts and your focus is distracted because you cant look straight ahead at your work and are constantly turning your head from left to right all day.
Its a bad ergo. Little curve good. Big curve only for gaming immersion. I refuse to use dual monitors even if a 27 inch panel is provided.
Is turning you head left and right really worse for the neck than rigidly keeping staring straight for hours? Somehow I find it hard to believe.
I have a 32 inch flat display and I actually do think it would have been better with a bit of a curve. It would help keep the distance of all points of the screen from me more consistent. If I sat another couple feet back from the display, then I think the flat screen would make more sense because the relative difference in distance would be smaller.
> so viewing the image on a flat screen looks exactly the same as how it originally appeared.
What about all the other things you view on your screen?
Depends on size. With a 49" it absolutely helps because it reduced how much you need to change the distance your eyes are focusing at between center and sides.
I used to not like them until I've switched to the 57", 1000R Samsung. I love it.
This is nonsense, at least in part because it's mixing two different ideas. The notion that the image "looks exactly the same as how it originally appeared" is only true when one of your eyes is positioned exactly where the camera sensor would have been, which requires a specific distance away from the screen.
Lines in 3D remaining straight in a photo is unrelated and not actually demonstrated by the image. I'm having trouble imagining why this matters - you're trying to find the intersection of two lines in an image without drawing anything?
I don't like them either, because they reflect and focus sound back at you.
Curved displays are great if you are near a window or any other light source that causes glare. I switched from flat to curved and there’s no more glare on my display.
I don't get 'em either.
What I really don't like are superwide monitors. They play hell with usability in screen-sharing contexts.
That was a concern when I had an ultrawide monitor. Fortunately I remote into work and the screen share happens on that remote side. So whenever I had to screen share, I would take Citrix Viewer out of full screen and size the window to my best estimate of 16:9. I don't think anyone ever knew that I was using an ultrawide monitor, though I do wonder if they ever noticed that the aspect ratio of my desktop shifted a bit between each sharing session.
I have a 2x 4k ultrawide. The Samsung Oddysey 55(?)inch variant.
Not only is it very bright and legible, the fact that the screen takes up my field of view helps me focus.
And I connect it to my MacBook using two seperate HDMI cables, so it's essentially two seperate monitors without bezels. I think I'll probably keep this monitor for a decade or so: any higher DPI and it doesn't make any difference because you have to size up the text. Any brighter and my eyes will burn out of their sockets.
The top end Samsung Odyssey monitors definitely near impossible to beat with any other choice for folks that prefer curved displays. For folks that like flat, something like the PG32UQX is probably one of the better equivalents since the flat Odyssey monitors always assume "I want the highest end version" = "I want the curved version".
For those who don't care about maximum brightness quite as much, the new OLEDs are getting quite good for both curved and flat (though the lifespan issue isn't quite as fully solved as the manufacturers would like to have you believe, it's significantly better).
> any higher DPI and it doesn't make any difference because you have to size up the text.
I get irked (to perhaps irrational levels) when a monitor's DPI (really PPI) is phrased in terms of how big text appears. Text is already sized in physically based units (even when CSS lies and says "px" it's really fractions of an inch, similar to pt), DPI is how sharp/clear the text ends up looking for the given font size.
A monitor with twice the DPI should give you clearer text, not smaller text.
How do you use two of these massive monitors? They are stacked vertically?
"straight lines are no longer straight"
Minkowski space-time enters the chat
I think curves make sense for e.g. those 34-40" 21:9 and 49" 32:9 displays, because otherwise the edges are much further from your peripheral vision, requiring you to change focus significantly to look at different parts of the screen. My mother has a 22" 16:9 curved screen, and it's impossible to sit at a distance for which the curve is useful while still preserving your ability to actually focus on the fucking thing.
